Tourism boost for Vredefort Dome
When handing the posters to the Parys Info & Tourism office, Prof. Gibson expressed the wish that the posters should be displayed in prominent publicly-accesible places where they can be seen as people walk and go when visiting the town.
Whether it is scientific, curiosity, historical or cultural interest, ecotourism or adventure activities – the Vredefort Dome has something special to offer each visitor. The site’s importance and value in promoting desired tourism activities and contributing to the research by geological scientists from all over the world, cannot be overlooked. Although not proclaimed as a World Heritage Site in terms of South African law yet, it has been inscribed on the Unesco World Heritage List since 2005, being the oldest, largest and most deeply eroded complex meteorite impact structure in the world – nearly twice as big as the impact that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Yet many tourists do not know what to expect when visiting the Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site, says Prof. Roger Gibson from Wits University’s School of Geological Sciences. Having spent many years researching the Vredefort Impact event since 1991, and as co-writer of the book Meteorite Impact, he found that people often mistakenly think they will be able to see the impact as a hole in the ground. Yet the uniqueness of the Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site lies in the geological wonder.
Over many hundreds of million years, rivers eroded the sides of the crater and most of the cooled melt-rock.
This exposed the rocks that once lay underneath the crater. Today, the rocks in the Vredefort Dome are exposed in several rings.
The oldest rocks that were buried deep within the crust before the impact event are found in the centre. These are mostly granite gneisses over 3,000 million years old.
Parys and Vredefort are built on these gneisses that have been mined for their stone in many quarries. The hills of the Vredefort mountainlaind are made of hard white quartzite rock, with the valleys in-between made of softer shale. Some thin layers containing a little gold were once mined from these rocks near Venterskroon.
Beyond the hills towards Potchefstroom and Fochville lie softer lava and dolomite rocks that form flatter land. All these rocks from part of the Vredefort Dome. Only a small part of the Vredefort Dome along the Vaal River, between Parys/ Potchefstroom and Vredefort/ Potchefstroom roads, has been declared a World Heritage Site.
This imformation forms part of a brochure compiled by Prof. Gibson and the Wits School of Geological Sciences for the Free State Government after Unesco’s listing of the site. The brochure was widely distributed and is still available at the Parys Info & Tourism office. When visiting the Site for fieldwork in the past week, Prof. Gibson donated ten explanatory posters in Afrikaans, English and Sesotho to the Parys community. These colour copies of the printed brochures answer tourists’ questions, like what a World Heritage Site is, what happened after the impact, the geology of the Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site and where it is.
When handing the posters to the Parys Info & Tourism office, Prof. Gibson expressed the wish that the posters should be displayed in prominent publicly-accesible places where they can be seen as people walk and go when visiting the town. Suitable places to display these posters will be decided on in the new year.
During his visit, sampling were done for different studies at Inlandzee, south-east of Vredefort, where the most extreme impact of the meteorite was. Ricart Boneschans, lecturer at the School for Geo- and Spacial Sciences at the North-West University’s Potchefstroom Campus, and Jacolene Wales, an MSc student at the School of Geosciences at Wits accompanied Prof. Gibson.
Jacolene is studying the result of shock on minerals in the centre of the impact on the Leuco granites, while Ricart is working on the core granites for Phd study, looking at less well known intrusion in the core.
